Behind the Scenes

Personally, June is my favorite month of the year, and celebrating Pride is one of my favorite summer happenings in Chicago. But in light of COVID-19, Pride month looks a bit different this year- there are no parades, festivals, or ways to gather and celebrate, in person, the bravery and resilience of our community.

The last 10 weeks have turned our world upside down and ushered more loss than I believe any of us could have anticipated. But I refuse to let this hinder my ability to celebrate Pride month with you, and I hope that we can celebrate together in a special way this June. My deepest hope is that we can provide a safe space for you to engage, connect, and celebrate with us.

Throughout this month we will provide summer activities you can do with your family at home in your own pride celebrations, provide resources for your family covering a vast array of LGBTQIA+ topics, and celebrate our community through dance, theatre, poetry and music- in true danztheatre fashion.

Usually, there is only one day for a Pride parade, one weekend for Pride fest, one single moment to recognize the beauty and perseverance of the gay community. Let's truly find the meaning of Pride Month this year - honoring those lost to hate crimes and HIV/AIDS, thanking those who are continuing to fight for equality, and advocating for our younger generations that they may never know the pain and tribulations of a world before LGBTQIA+ Pride.

Happy Pride, Chicago. I can’t wait to celebrate with you all this month.

Tonight, May 8th 2020, would have been opening night for What We Carried, a night I have been looking forward to for a year. But tonight we cannot celebrate with you in person or dance with Jean Parisi’s breathtaking art installment. Tonight we cannot show you what we so desperately want to share, to highlight the struggles and successes of immigrants.

But what I am choosing to focus on is the day that we will share this work with you. When we can dance for you and share this collection of stories. The days of Togetherness.

This work would have been dedicated to my grandmother who immigrated from Columbia in the mid 1900’s and worked as a nurse before passing away at a young age.

Today I still want to dedicate this work to my grandmother, one of many whose story of immigration was lost - and in extension, I also want to dedicate this day to our frontline workers and heroes during this pandemic - our nurses, our grocery workers, our doctors, our cooks. To the ones putting their lives at risk for us all. The days of Togetherness will come, and I can’t wait to share this work with you all once we have made it there.

I’ve spent months thinking about what this performance means to me, and what it might mean to its potential audience.

Growing up as a queer artist in Indiana, it wasn’t uncommon to get somebody’s shit thrown at me from a passing car, along with a shout of “what’s up Fabio,” or “look out, faggot!” You couldn’t dress too fancy, “present” as too effeminate or artistic, and I learned, over time and repeated abuse, including from my own family, to blend in.

As a white male living in Chicago, it’s not uncommon to be sneered at by people in what are ostensibly my own queer communities, assuming I’m just another cis male, not queer enough to fit into the gay or trans communities, told to go live in my “privilege,” (which I do no doubt have), and again, forced back to blending in.

Intolerance is everywhere. I started working in an ensemble after making a series of performance works about toxic masculinity and white supremacy, and my impulse was to somehow try and codify the refraction of our belief systems as we move through the distortional and dissociative effects of these forces on our minds.

That ensemble, called Mirrorglass, is also an interrogation of the “blinkering” and fragmentation that occurs in any instance of emotional or personality disordering, or in any instance within which subjective, lived experience is fragmented beyond recognition. Similar to how art is not inherently inclusive. It has to be wrested into meaning.

I’m so proud to work with the dancers forming this ensemble as they move in and out of Mirrorglass, and to finally see myself, reflected in our efforts at a salutary artistic collaboration, so thank you to Viginia VanLieshout for dancing this with me, Tate Glover for providing choreography, Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble Artistic Director Maggie Robinson, Marketing Coordinator Sophia Sinsheimer and to the tolerant of this world.

- Michael Workman

Michael Workmanis an artist, writer and reporter, choreographer, dance, performance art and sociocultural critic. In addition to his work at the Chicago Tribune, Guardian US, Newcity magazine, Workman is also Director of Bridge, a Chicago-based 501 (c) (3) publishing and programming organization. His choreographic writing has been included in Propositional Attitudes, published by Golden Spike Press, and his Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries by StepSister Press was released in October 2018 with a day-long program of performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art and SITE/less Chicago.

Come see Michael's work in The Queer Landscape, playing March 20th and 21st at Ebenezer Lutheran Church Auditorium!​

I didn’t realize I was gay until I was in my late 20’s, and even then, it was a long, painful journey to accept my own identity. There were so many layers of cultural learning and expectations, forces both internal and external shaping who I thought I “should” be. “How Did You Not Know” is an exploration of the many iterations of myself I went through in those years.

Dance has always helped me to process and reflect on my feelings, learning about my own perspective through the work I set: the creation of a piece being an integral part of understanding my own experience. In this work, I have reset and re-imagined pieces I created during my long, hard journey to self-acceptance, allowing the pieces I set during those periods to be a guide to my mindset and perspective at the time of its creation. By linking these old pieces together, my evolving world-view can be tracked through those years - my journey away from the church and religion, my slow gain of self-reliance and self-worth, and the realization of my sexuality. It is also a high-level view of my evolving style and skill - I grew a lot as a choreographer and storyteller in the 5-year span these pieces cover.

It is a little daunting to put such a personal work on stage in front of an audience - it’s a little like reading my diary aloud. It can be embarrassing to look back at what I thought was true in those times, what I thought was real, who I thought I was. But through the years of this journey, and the process of creating this piece, I’ve learned that I have always been the woman in these pieces, and she will always be a part of me. I didn’t quite know who she would be later, who the integration of these disparate parts of myself would end up being. Turns out, she’s me.

- Paula Ward, Lucid Banter Project

Paula Ward (Artistic Director, Lucid Banter Project) is a dancer, choreographer and producer from Madison, Wisconsin. She was a youth company member of the Madison Ballet, danced in Hope College’s modern and jazz companies while earning her BA in Dance and Chemistry, and spent a decade with the Joel Hall Dancers in Chicago, Illinois. She directed the Joel Hall Dancers Youth Company and Le Ballet Petit School of Dance before forming her contemporary dance company, the Lucid Banter Project, which is currently in its fourth year. Lucid Banter presents in many non-traditional spaces and stages, as well as on film.

See Lucid Banter Project's "How Did You Not Know" in The Queer Landscape, March 20th and 21st. ​Tickets on sale now!

“Enuf” was originally created by a group of dancers at Northern Illinois University in 2017. Dance Loop Chicago Founder Paula Frasz saw a train go by, and on there was graffiti and in big words it said “Enuf” and she felt like that was true: Enuf is enough with all of the violence going on in Chicago. So she decided to set a piece about it. At the time, I was a student at Northern so I helped Paula by giving different stories that I had gone through, have seen, or stories passed down to me. Later this same piece was taken to Washington, DC - it was a finalist in the American College Dance Association in 2017. We are pleased to now have this piece be our signature piece for Dance Loop Chicago.

Most of the dancers who are performing this weekend are getting ready to graduate from Northern Illinois University and others are graduates of the University. So all dancers come together and reunite to work on this amazing piece. We all share our stories of how the piece makes us feel and how we want the audience to view the matter.

- Amber Echols, Dance Loop Chicago

See Dance Loop Chicago in Stories of Chicago, running January 24th and 25th at Ebenezer Lutheran Church Auditorium!Tickets on sale now!

Dancing Beyond the Borderline provides first account recollections of the Great Migration, a look at life in Chicago's infamous Black Belt through Jazz in the Alley founder Jimmy Ellis, and a forward to a celebration of resilience through Black social dances of the 1990's. This excerpt of the work features South Chicago Dance Theatre company member Shannon Washington dancing to Al Green's "Summertime" in an ode to my great grandmother, who migrated to Chicago's Black Belt during the Great Migration.- Kia Smith, South Chicago Dance Theatre

Kia Smith (Choreographer, Executive Artistic Director of South Chicago Dance Theatre)is the founding Executive Artistic Director of the South Chicago Dance Theatre and the company's Resident Choreographer. She uses a range of aesthetic values to cultivate versatile artists including the Lester Horton technique, the American Ballet Theatre's National Training Curriculum where she is a Project Plie Partner teacher, Jazz, Improvisation, and Africanist principals of movement theory. In 2018, she received the inaugural Young and Ambitious Entrepreneurship Award from the Metropolitan Board of the Chicago Urban League and was chosen by the New York City-based Stage Director's and Choreographers Foundation as a member of the national Observership class.

See South Chicago Dance Theatre in Stories of Chicago, running January 24th and 25th at Ebenezer Lutheran Church Auditorium!Tickets On Sale Now!

Preparing for our tenth anniversary, Lucy and I wanted to celebrate by presenting an evening of new work that dove into the many emotions, feelings, and sensations we have felt over the past two years. It’s not in my nature to be overtly political, but recently I’ve felt an insistent call to participate in the world around me more truthfully. With Lucy’s encouragement and the dancers’ willing nature, we began the months long process of unraveling a point of view that shouts with anger and softens with tenderness. At the heart of RE|dance group’s work is an unyielding yearning for love and acceptance. This idea stirs deeply throughout The Biggest Wail From The Bottom Of My Heart.

This dance theatre work reflects the urgency, need, and desire to reject ignorance. The work subtlety calls attention to revolution. Feelings of despair and uncertainty are powerful mechanisms for change. A personal voice is a powerful voice. This work, for me, is a call to action, a plea, and a proclamation.

Lucy and I are so grateful to have established a home with RE|dance group that has nurtured our creative voices for the past 10 years. We find this to be one of our greatest accomplishments both personally and professionally. This work would not be possible without a group of artists who bring their full selves to the studio every time. Daiva, Zach, Stacy, Erika, Corinne, Anthony, Danielle and Melanie are remarkable human beings. Their commitment, drive, and energy exemplify and deepen our mission to create emotionally complex work that examines the human condition. I am awed by their curiosity, intellect, vulnerability, and courage.

CDE’s Art + Activism series is giving us another opportunity to share excerpts from The Biggest Wail From the Bottom of My Heart in response to the current political landscape; which promotes marginalization rather than unity. The excerpt explores how the body, through percussive action, represents a protest against established societal norms. Subject matter considers how we, as a company of primarily white dancers, contribute to the expanding dialogue about race, injustice and ignorance in America.

- Michael Estanich, RE|Dance Group

Michael Estanich (Artistic Director, RE|Dance Group)'s creative research currently examines ideas about the intersection of the physical body with space, architecture, and landscape often resulting in dances supported by sculptural environments. He is a Professor of Dance at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point where he teaches modern dance technique, composition, dance pedagogy, movement analysis and dance history. He earned his MFA from The Ohio State University and his BFA from Denison University. Michael’s performance credits include Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, Cerulean Dance Theatre, Rebecca Rosen, Melanie Bales, Bebe Miller, a reconstruction of Mark Morris’ choreography All Fours, and Susan Marshall's ARMS. He is the Mainstage Choreographer at the Trollwood Performing Arts School in Moorhead, MN and Vice President of Nominations and Elections for the American College Dance Association (ACDA).

See RE|Dance Group in Stories of Chicago, running January 24th and 25th at Ebenezer Lutheran Church Auditorium!Tickets On Sale Now!

Late February, I was blatantly avoiding emails (read:scrolling mindlessly through Facebook and pressing the refresh button every 30 seconds in the hopes that something new and entertaining materializes on the screen which almost never happens), when I came across a post by an old college friend and collaborator. She was seeking dancers for an ongoing project and I thought “why not?”.

And that is precisely where I got stuck. Right out of the gate, my anxiety, a tightly-wound, high-strung thing who takes up perpetual residence in my brain and plays My Chemical Romance on loop, raised its voice and said, “Why in the name of Gerard Way would she hire you?”. It then proceeded to name off a delightful list of reasons why this will more than likely go horribly wrong.-You’re out of shape-You’re out of practice-You’re socially awkward and suck at putting yourself on the spot-You’re generally awkward and will probably embarrass yourself-You haven’t spoken to this person in some time and that makes you an awful friend and human being-She will probably say no

That last one usually does it. That two-letter word has the stopping power of a brick wall.Immovable. Foreboding. Rough and scratchy and not at all pleasant to climb.

What I tend to forget, however, is that brick walls have to come to an end somewhere so why not walk around? Adjust course, proceed as planned. I’ve learned a thing or two about dealing with my anxiety and that usually means reminding myself that it is wrong. A lot. It doesn’t provide solutions, only nerve-ridden assumptions that rarely, if ever, actually come into fruition. Thankfully.

So, I sit up straight, open a new email draft...

And here I am.

But here’s the thing about my angsty little buddy: It is a constant, worming its way into nearly every single facet of my life. Some days it lies dormant, napping quietly, only to be jostled awake by even the smallest of minor “concerns” moments later. It is the exhausted, berated so-n'-so dragging Shame and Regret around by the collars.

While my anxiety does aim to protect me from potential undoing (and probable embarrassment if I’m being perfectly honest with myself), those other two nip at my heels, pinch at my skin and offer nothing constructive in return. I have learned to live and communicate with my anxiety, to understand its purpose and accept it. When I feel the panic rising, I ask myself why it is sounding the alarms and adjust course. It’s a learning process. We’re still in it, my anxiety and I, but we’re making progress. We make a pretty okay team.

Shame is a different beast entirely. Shame is the throat-crushing reminder that every choice you ever made, even those made in self-preservation, was a mistake. It tells you that you dug your own hole as it stands at the precipice, pouring dirt over your head by the fistful. It sits on your chest at night, whispering alternate endings and conspiracy theories in your ear like a caffeine-addled teen on Tumblr in the wee hours of the morning.

It is catty.It is relentless.

For years I willingly carried Shame around on my back, letting it goad me down a path of its choosing. And it wasn’t scenic. But I wasn’t blind. I could still see other paths pass me by, but Shame would wrap its bony fingers around my chin and wrench my gaze elsewhere, directing me down the road that forced me to re-experience those awful moments over and over and over and over and over….

Suffice it to say, it’s a nasty little bugger.

So… Why am I sharing this with you? What does this have to do with this dance? When I sent that email, I had no clue I would be stepping into the role of an old adversary. I would be facing it head on instead of feeling it hover behind me. I would have to acknowledge it, study it, and become it.

In a bizarre turn of events, my reticence towards Shame faded almost immediately. By taking on Shame as a character, it humanizes it and makes it just as fallible. It holds less power over me because I see that it, too, is wrong more often than not. It bases its arguments on cognitive distortions, not reality.

It is a voice that speaks only in lies coated in a thin veneer of skewed truths.

This production is not a representation of the triggering event as it actually happened, but how the mind mangled and obscured it. That distorted sense of reality is what the mind latched onto and shook loose from a ramshackle narrative built on the lies of faceless voices. However, when we give faces to those voices and place them in a physical space, they are still frightening, don’t get me wrong, but at least we are fighting an enemy we can see on turf we can control.

This project represents every performer’s personal battle; the skirmishes we managed win and those we lost with grit and determination looking forward towards the next round. It is a shared experience of tenaciousness and acceptance. It offers a safe space to begin to understand those voices and how to lessen their hold. We are all an extension of the Hero, their fears, their mind, and their resolution.

I am Shame.

I am a character.

I am Shame but Shame holds no power over me.

- Molly Hillson

MOLLYHILLSON (SHAME), originally from Seattle, Washington, is a Chicago-based dancer and visual artist. She began her training with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Colorado Ballet, Colorado Youth Dance Theater, and received her arts endorsed diploma from Denver School of the Arts. Since completing her BA at Columbia College Chicago (‘13), Molly has since performed with many wonderful artists around the Chicago-area and is currently on staff with the Joffrey Ballet and Synapse Arts. Molly is very excited to join the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble for i bet you think this dance is about you!​​See Molly perform as, "Shame," in, i bet you think this dance is about you.Now Open!Friday & Saturday, 8pmMay 10, 11, 17, 181650 W. Foster Ave, ChicagoClick here for tickets!

I have started and erased what to say in this blog post more times than I care to admit. A show that is perhaps the most personal, cathartic piece of dance I’ve ever worked on and I’m rendered (nearly) speechless.

Do I tell you about our process?

Do I share one of the letters I submitted last summer to show where I was at a year ago compared to how?

Do I talk about how the journey of the Hero in this piece is so completely familiar and hits so close to home?

Truthfully, I don’t know what route to take today.

I think I will start by saying that I am thankful, so indescribably thankful and fortunate to work on this piece and share this story with some of the artists I consider my Chicago family. Most of us have worked together for 3 years and I am humbled to create alongside them and share a story of self-evaluation and empowerment. This has been one of the most determined, satisfying, fluid creative processes I’ve ever worked on. The ebb and flow of this group is remarkable and I am so proud of each and every team member we have in this piece. I could dote on them endlessly, so, if nothing else, I hope to see you at this show to celebrate their beautiful artistry and what they have each put into this collaboration.

I think from here I will also say that I feel incredibly vulnerable going into May and sharing this show with you, but I can’t wait for you to see this one. The past year has been one of growth and going from one of the darkest periods in my life to one where now, when people ask me how I’m doing, I can truthfully and unabashedly say, “I am happier than I have ever been.” So much of that happiness is new found and, for the first time, only reflective of the work I have done to confront the same “inner demons” the Hero does in this story we share in,I i bet you think this dance is about you.

This past year was the year of confronting grief, depression, heartbreak- and sitting in the quiet stillness of myself and finding a path that has lead me to self-empowerment and independency. Another reason I hope you see this show is because I truly believe there is something in this for everyone. We all have our universal, but still personal pains and hurts and heartbreaks. I think this piece engages the audience to consider how common our inner demons may be and how we can de-stigmatize the discussion of mental health and seeking help (and making help more accessible) when we want and need it.

Please come share in this journey with us. We have put our hearts and souls into this work and can’t wait to see you there.

​-Maggie Robinson

See Maggie perform as the 'Hero' in, i bet you think this dance is about you. Tickets on sale now!May 3-18Friday & Saturday, 8pm1650 W. Foster Ave, ChicagoCLICK HERE FOR TICKETS

Maggie Robinson is thrilled to be with CDE for a third season. She hails from Tennessee and received her BFA in Musical Theatre Performance (University of Memphis).

One of my favorite things about IBYTTDIAY (and CDE in general), is the emphasis on interdisciplinary work.The final product will draw from dance, theater, writing, and an original score.

Several months ago, CDE put out a call for letters from the public that were never meant to be sent. We received all sorts of submissions ranging from deeply introspective to forcefully confrontational.We grouped these letters into different emotional brackets, the embodiments of which will appear in performance.

Everyone involved in this project has a different artistic background.Some are dancers, some actors, but through these last several months, we’ve all been able to learn from each other’s strengths and draw on our own to influence our individual characters.

I portray, ‘Grief’.My initial inspiration for this character came in shape of broad ideas and concepts, which with the help of Sara and my cast-mates has formed into a specific physical story.

One of the biggest challenges for me during this process has been to find specificity and not simply rely on the idea of what I’m trying to convey. Watching everyone else’s process and working to combine so many different artistic mediums towards one goal has been such a rewarding journey. ​

​- Sarah Franzel

See Sarah perform as, 'Grief,' in, i bet you think this dance is about you!

Sarah Franzel is delighted to be working with CDE yet again after appearing in Ethereal Abandonment and the Adventures of Ricky the Rabbit (collaboration with Chicago parks district). She has worked with various companies in Maine and Chicago including Theater at Monmouth, Harborside Shakespeare, City Lit, EDGE, and Unrehearsed Shakespeare.Photography by Matthew Gregory Hollis